The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)

Winging it

Douglas Sirk made this film not long after Written on the Wind, hoping lightning strikes twice, but no--the box-office was smaller, the critics less enthusiastic (took Jean-Luc Godard and the Cahiers crowd both waxing poetic to rehabilitate Sirk's reputation, from shameless hustler of glossy women's melodramas to ironic subverter of glossy women's melodramas). Where Wind was about the oil-rich Hadleys with their decadence on display in splashy Technicolor (the story a thinly veiled euphemism for the real-life scandal involving Zachary Smith Reynolds), Angels is about a family of airborne gypsies, eking out a life from barnstorming tours and dangerous airshow races during the Depression--grim, grimy black-and-white fare compared to the allure of the Hadleys.

And yet and yet and yet--Sirk considered Angels one of his best films; William Faulkner considered it the finest adaptation of his work ever (from the novel Pylon, one of the rare fictions set outside of his imagined Yoknapatawpha County). 

Lush Dorothy Malone of the bold brows and rich blond tresses plays LaVerne Shumann; like her Marylee Hadley in Written, LaVerne has the look of a voracious maneater; unlike Hadley, LaVerne has a child named Jack (Chris Olsen) in tow and appears faithful to her husband, ex-World War l pilot Roger Shumann (Robert Stack)--'appears' because there's doubt about Jack, who's willing to jump up and fight anyone who asks: "Who's your father? Who's your father?"

Marylee was ridiculously dangerous fun, as likely to yank you into bed for a quick tumble as kick you to death with one of her jawdropping voodoo dances; LaVerne is a considerably more subdued figure, an exhausted mother and neglected wife who only seems to come to life when she leaps from the wing of Roger's plane in a parachute. You wonder at her enthusiasm for skydiving--is the desperate need to clutch at life what turns her on (she floats to earth clutching a trapeze bar), or the possibility that she could end it all just by letting go?

Marylee you approached for thrills; LaVerne you approached because she smoldered--won't give the time of day (to your surprise) but you can't help approaching anyway. Marylee would throw herself at you (god help you if she did); LaVerne never...unless told. That the same actress played both roles with the same simmering sensuality put to differing use seems extraordinary. 

Then there's Robert Stack. As Kyle Hadley he's a live wire, all tense mouth and a pair of insanely glittering gemstones eyes. When he's drunk which is most of the time he gives a low Tommy Udo chuckle and staggers across the wide screen. Stack's Roger Shumann is considerably more sober--or if he's drunk he's drunk on the idea of flight, addicted to the high that airborne danger can give him. Stack's Hadley is an overgrown child afflicted with the whims and tantrums of the wealthy; when Shumann rejects you it's with the deliberate disdain of a man, a former ace who fought in the war and knows the hard life. 

And finally Rock Hudson--in Wind an unconvincing paragon of virtue (he pined after Kyle's wife Lucy (Lauren Bacall) but at a discreet distance), in Angels an I suspect autobiographical sketch of Faulkner himself, complete with drinking problem and a tenuous working relationship with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, admiring Schumann and his family to the point of destroying them.  

Hudson's Burke Devlin (unnamed in the novel) holds an ambivalent position in the film: he's first attracted to Jack's fearless spunk, then to Roger's cool charisma, finally and fatally to Malone's hothouse beauty. He loves these people, loves their migrant work ethic, their simple survival tactic of clutching onto the skin of the world and hanging on; he would if he could enable their dreams but when he makes an attempt the most he enables is Roger's doom. 

Hudson isn't a great actor as Sirk and Hudson himself might admit but this is perhaps his finest performance. When Burke talks of Roger he waxes rhapsodic: "These flying Gypsies look like you and me but they're not human beings...burn them and they don't even holler; scratch one, it's not even blood they bleed." There's an impassioned glow to Devlin's face when he speaks, not unlike LaVerne's when she regards Roger, or Roger's when he regards his plane; delivered by the impossibly beautiful Rock Hudson the speech seems to come from a saint tied to a stake about to be martyred, the flames licking his robes a testament to the truth of his words.  

Sirk opted for black and white, to better fit Faulkner's melancholy mood, and in my book was being more honest than smart; you miss the color palette Russell Metty employed for many of Sirk's '50s films, and you miss the shocking reds Vincente Minnelli splashed across the screen in the climactic carnival sequence to his Some Came Running, but journeyman cinematographer Irving Glassberg delivering what may be his career best for Sirk here captures Orleans' Mardi Gras not at its most lurid but at its most depressingly drab, with only Frank Skinner's braying trumpets suggesting a drunken gaiety already in its hangover phase. And in its Cinemascope format--reportedly not Sirk's favorite medium--the pylon races are a nightmare sport, the camera in extreme long shot unblinkingly watching the desperate scramble of the planes, buzzing the towers closer and closer like moths drawn to flame. 

It's against this bleak background of monochrome squalor that Sirk sets his more realistic Faulknerian figures: Malone's LaVerne, with her spark of decency that draws the eye and holds it longer than her faded sexual charisma; Stack's Roger with his exhausted exhausting obsession with flight, a nugget of nobility somehow still shining through; and Burke's alcoholic sensitivity, that sees these people and yearns to immortalize them with his all too mortal prose. Sirk by insisting on showing us Orleans and his film's characters as they are, yet allowing them to show us what they want to be, describes the kind of self-destructive trance we all entertain--like the audience watching the planes tumble, running up close despite the announcer's cries to stay away; like Burke with his air gypsies, fascinated despite knowing better; like the planes swarming those motionless pitiless pylons. The Tarnished Angels may not have been Sirk's greatest commercial success, may not be his best known or best loved feature today, but in my book if it's not the summit of his art it's damned close, and possibly his masterpiece.